Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: The Ultimate HTML Reference
Iain Laskey thinks this book should find a space on every web designers bookshelf.
| Product | The Ultimate HTML Reference |
|---|---|
| Company | Sitepoint |
| Web | www.sitepoint.com |
| Price | £27.99 |
| We like | Clear, concise information, looks and feels good. |
| We don't like | Not as thorough as the title suggests |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
Whilst there are hundreds of HTML books out there, only a small proportion fall in to the reference category. We were thus immediately attracted by the title of this new book from Sitepoint
The Author Ian Lloyd runs Accessify.com and is well known in the web development community so we expected great things of this title
The book starts off with a brief overview of HTML, doctypes and the differnence between HTML and XHTML. Interestingly, the author clearly has his finger on the pulse and notes that even though the industry has been pushing XHTML quite aggressively as being best-practice, there is now a feeling that HTML isn't all bad and has its place in the world. What a contrary lot web developers are!
The bulk of the book is naturally the reference section. This is broken up into related tags with grouping such as structure, text formatting and forms. Each tag has a box indicating the HTML version, if it's required or not and usefully if it's deprecated, which quite a number are now. It also indicates which browsers support it. The tag then has its format described, an example of its use and some notes.
Unlike many IT books, this one is hardback so ought to stay less dog-eared than most as it's likely to get a lot of thumbing through. The layout is clear, concise and the typography has been well thought out making it a pleasure to use. However, We would quibble with describing it as being the ultimate reference. Whilst each tag has its attributes listed, they aren't always desribed and the index is fairly minimal, effectively an alphabetical list of the tags, meaning you can end up flicking back and forth looking for more details. It's perhaps unfortunate that the nature of HTML means that the same attritubutes can appear in many different tags and whilst a section at the end does discuss the core ones, a lot do get missed out.
One area where the author adds real value is where he discusses how some tag's usage is to be handled. Some tags such as <i> are still valid but with rapdily declining usage as we are now encouraged to put more semantic meaning into documents with tags like <strong>. Also, accesskeys may be inneffective as many users won't even realise they've been set up and again, the discussion on these problems is useful.
Conclusion
On balance, despite not being as ultimate as we'd like, we still feel that The Ultimate HTML Reference is a fine book. For web designers who want a quick and easy way to check a tag to see how to use it, what it can do and more importantly, which browsers it works on (and it covers the many versions of IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera), Ian Lloyd's latest book is a must-have.
